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Do We Need God to be Good?
To know how to live do we need God and religion, or, does religion only produce wars, hatred, intolerance and unhappiness? Does giving up God mean giving up morality, or, can we finally live a peaceful and fulfilling life as atheists by following science and reason instead? The anthropologist Christopher Hallpike has spent a lifetime's research on the morality and religion of different cultures around the world, and shows that trying to base a moral life on atheism and science actually has some very nasty surprises in store for us.
How We Got Here
Only 10,000 years ago, our ancestors were small groups of hunter-gatherers, with bows and arrows and stone tools. Today, we live in vast nations with all the power of modern science and industry, and the ability to send men to the Moon and to destroy all life on the planet. In the history of the world, 10,000 years is the blink of an eye, yet it has seen the total transformation of human existence. That extraordinary revolution is just as interesting as the Big Bang, or the origin of life, and this book is a clear and concise explanation of how it happened. Human culture was something completely new in the history of the world, and has evolved in a unique way. Darwin's theory of evolution can tell us nothing at all about this very strange process, that went far beyond any mundane struggle for physical survival by 'naked apes'. The picture of Stonehenge, built with enormous labour for no material reward, illustrates one of the central themes of this book - the fundamental importance of the human imagination to the development of science, that made possiblethe modern mastery of nature.
On Primitive Society
Political correctness in social anthropology has made the terms primitive society, social evolution and even human nature unacceptable, and removed the possibility of open academic debate about them. Written from the perspective of a lifetimes research, this collection of papers takes a hard look at these taboos, and challenges some fundamental assumptions of post-modern thinking. Including some new material on memetics, evolutionary psychology and Darwinian theory in the social sciences, this collection provides a long-overdue assessment of some key topics in modern anthropology.
Ethical Thought in Increasingly Complex Societies
Ethical Thought in Increasingly Complex Societies: Social Structure and Moral Development combines insights of developmental psychology and cultural anthropology to examine the development of moral thinking. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of small-scale communities of hunter-gatherers and farmers in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea, C.R. Hallpike studies the means by which individual thinking interacts with complex social factors to produce moral ideas and the effects of worldview on ethical systems. This book is recommended for scholars of psychology, anthropology, and philosophy.
The Principles of Social Evolution
How do societies evolve? This is one of the central problems of social anthropology, and in this book C.R. Hallpike proposes an entirely novel solution which no anthropologist can afford to ignore. Current theories all assume that institutions survive and spread because of their adaptive advantages. A wide variety of forms may survive, however, because of a lack of effective competition in an undemanding social environment. Their real evolutionary significance lies in developmental potential.This is particularly true of religious and military institutions and kinship structures; when these are combined in the right way significant new forms, such as the state, may emerge. In his study Professor Hallpike compares in detail the core principles of Chinese and Indo-European society, arguing that a limited number of social and cosmological principles guide the evolution of each society. The traditional concepts of adaptive advantage, random variation, and environmentaldeterminism are effectively challenged.Hardback still available, published December 1986.
Ship of Fools
Since Man's ancestors used to live in a primitive manner, understanding primitive societies is essential to understanding the human race itself. Unfortunately a variety of journalists, social scientists, biologists, and evolutionary psychologists erroneously believe they are qualified to write about these societies without knowing much about them.
The Konso of Ethiopia
When The Konso of Ethiopia was first published in 1972, the American Anthropologist described it as 'a work which is destined to become a classic'. The Konso are one of the most important peoples of East Africa, and the author was able to revisit them in 1997. As a result he discovered large amounts of entirely new material, and has been able to produce a completely revised edition that takes account of all the research on the Konso of the last thirty-five years. The result is the definitive account of a truly fascinating people, whose traditional culture is fast disappearing.
The Translation of Culture
Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1971 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.
